Tech Jobs Tour in The Mission
Tech Jobs Tour in San Francisco was unlike any other technology or job fair I’ve ever attended. To begin with the event queue was already snaked in front of the Grand Theater and around the block and I arrived early. Second and the most prominent faces were brown, black, Asian, South Indian and women. What was most interesting were Mission District pedestrians who did double takes when they glanced at the population of folks attending a tech job fair. No business as usual.
Once inside booths were shoulder to shoulder with job seekers eager for this kind of access to technology companies. One-on-one conversations with technology training representatives, HR folks and companies included start-ups to popular entities.
Career Fair Companies:
Stitch Fix
Good Eggs
Looker
Karat
Khan Academy
Avvo
BuildingConnected
Buoyant
Hustle
InfluxData Inc
LendUp
Redbubble
Welkin Health
Affirm
Bills.com
Magoosh
FIS Global
Square
Keynote and special guest speakers where cheered by the standing crowd in front of the stage. Inspiring inclusion as well as hard facts regarding the lack of inclusion in silicon valley, panelists offered up success stories while diversity activists spoke about parity in both jobs and leadership roles in technology.
Speed mentoring took place upstairs in sequential sessions as space permitted. Once inside the mentoring space, we broke into engineering, design and UX groups of folks then paired up addressing our roles and aspirations in the tech industry. Leadership prompt questions and rapid paring and sharing brought diversity to the forefront in many conversations.
The presence of include.io was everywhere from the little stickers to the projected logo on the speaker stage to the faces of the participants. Their product is a recruiting and retention platform that uses mini-mentoring sessions to validate diverse and non-traditional technical talent. They were in the right place here. As the official recruiting partner of Tech Jobs Tour, participants and job seekers can upload resumes and look for work in their desired fields.
Thanks TECH JOBS TOUR for showing America how to recruit inclusively. And many thanks to advisors:
Megan Smith, 3rd Chief Technology Officer, United States of America, Entrepreneur, Engineer, @smithmegan
Khalilah Harris, Chief of Staff & VP, External Affairs, Opportunity@Work, @ed2befree
Lateesha Thomas, Director, Partnerships & Corporate Training, Dev Bootcamp, @lateeshathomas
Tom Ogletree, Director of Social Impact at General Assembly, @tom_ogletree
